AJ O'Leary

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Movie Review: “Promising Young Woman” (2020)

Despite important subject matter, revenge fantasy misses the mark

Major spoilers follow.

When taking a cross-country flight, as one does sometimes, one looks to see how much the in-flight wifi costs. When one finds out American Airlines is charging 20 dollars for three hours of unreliable Internet, they instead turn to the plane's list of streamable movies.

In my case, I chose Promising Young Woman, a critically-acclaimed revenge thriller with an all-star cast headlined by Carey Mulligan (An Education, Drive). It wouldn't be a simple means of passing time; no, it would be a quality watch and a way to save the 20 dollars streaming services asked for during its simultaneous theatrical run and streaming release window. Right?

Unfortunately, not so much.

Promising Young Woman starts off on a note that's, well, promising, if not abrupt. In a scene sort of reminiscent of Nat Tena's sequence in the "White Christmas" episode of Black Mirror, med school dropout-turned-barista Cassie Thomas (Mulligan) is shown in a club, profoundly drunk. We're shown three lecherous men, one of whom (Adam Brody as Jerry) decides he's going to lure Cassie in under false pretenses of helpfulness. Jerry takes advantage of Cassie as expected, but with a twist; it turns out that she'd been feigning her drunkenness, and so she turns the tables on Jerry and gives him what's coming to him. She adds a notch to a notebook she keeps, presumably taking score of how many creepy men she's embarrassed.

The rest of Promising Young Woman plays out in a similar manner, upping the ante and becoming more elaborate each time around as we learn about Cassie's motivation — her best friend and med school classmate Nina killed herself after a violent rape that went without an investigation or consequences for the rapist — and aim to more specifically cause the downfalls of the men associated with the crime, going so far as to enter a relationship with one of the witnesses, a successful pediatrician named Ryan (Bo Burnham), to gain crucial bits of information. This crescendos into a deeply unsatisfying ending where she finally exacts revenge against the rapist at ultimate cost: her life, killed when the rapist himself (Chris Lowell as Al Monroe) smothers her to death with a pillow after she poses at a stripper at the bachelor party held in his honor the night before his wedding.

Promising Young Woman felt more like a collection of vignettes than a movie to me, and that's just the first of several reasons why I couldn't get into it and didn't like it. Not only does Promising Young Woman feel repetitive; perhaps as some intended meta-commentary on how the world treats victims that didn't land as intended, we're given far more information on Ryan and other parties responsible for or connected to Nina's rape and suicide and Cassie's psychologically-broken state than we are about the two women who are supposed to serve as the focal points of the film. Cassie never feels like a fully fleshed-out character so much as she comes off as a haphazardly thought-out cipher for what is essentially a 1970s-era exploitation film recontextualized to meet the contemporary political moment. (I do give credit to the filmmakers for Laverne Cox's character of Gail, Cassie's manager at the coffee shop she works at; as someone who isn't cis, it was refreshing for me to see Laverne Cox placed in a role that did not revolve around her gender identity. It helps demonstrate that we're all capable of playing characters who are about more than their gender identity, and I hope to see more characters like Gail in films and TV shows in the future.)

Then there's the matter of the ending. Cassie can't truly enjoy a personal triumph and confidently walk off into the sunset; no, she has to get killed by Nina's rapist. Again, I really doubt the director's intent here was malicious, but it made me feel like the moral of the story was "mess with bad men who deserve to have bad things happen to them and you'll meet your maker!". It's great that justice was served in the very end, but for a film where Cassie's constantly shown to defy what might happen to someone with Rube Goldberg-esque designs on revenge in reality on a level bordering on magical realism, I can't shake how bad it makes me feel that this was the point where her luck finally ran out.

Promising Young Woman, to me, is Crash for the Me Too era. It latches onto a message that is undeniably true — men do a ton of heinous shit and get away with it and we should believe women — and delivers its own statement pertaining to it with a hand so heavy that it feels patronizing, pointless, and perhaps worst of all, exploitative.

Overall Score: 2 / 5

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